Chapter 1 - Pedigree Dog

I buried my mother in the garden. She'd tended it for so many years the earth was still easy to work. Too easy. The task should've been a penance, as exhausting as the latrine I dug beside the potting shed. Instead, it proved no more challenging than watching a gardening programme on the telly, which my mother did with religious devotion and which I sometimes endured in agnostic tolerance.

Maybe the lawn was lank and corrupted with invading daisies and dandelions, maybe the flowerbeds and vegetable plots had surrendered to battalions of brambles and assorted weeds, but it was still recognisably my mother's garden. Oh, dad spent hours out here, too, contemplating his onions and trying not to get in mum's way, but it was always her garden.

I moved the azaleas she’d planted, her favourites, showing them all the care she would have done, keeping them safe while I cleared away the weed growth and dug the hole, then replanted the bushes in what was now a raised bed. It was a simple pyramid, and I wondered how long it would stay free of nature's return.

Afterwards I sat on the bench my father had built and regularly repaired in the face of perennial suggestions that we go buy some 'proper' garden seating. I sat, drinking from his bottle of malt whisky, watching the smoke drift across the treetops and point the way to town. I wanted to be alone with my ghosts, terminally alone. I wanted to be drunk, to exorcise the rational part of me that asked questions, needed explanations, sought answers. I wanted to be loud, maudlin and tearfully drunk, I wanted to guarantee that I could collapse unconscious and sleep without nightmares. All I could manage was as occasional sip from the bottle.

Memories aren't like a garden. They grow, they flourish, they fade away, but they're never orderly, you can't predict them like the seasons. You can't even weed them. The bad memories persevere, regardless how hard you try to uproot them. At best, they become numb, bland reminders of a past you try to convince yourself no longer hurts. No longer really hurts. But there are always fresh memories to plant, fresh weeds to spring up. And the echoes of the past endure … sometimes getting louder.

This was the first time in weeks I'd felt any sort of certainty about life. Weeks? More like years. This was my mother's garden, but it was planted with my memories. I'd grown up here. It was the one place on Earth I'd always felt secure. It was the one place where I always felt confident about who I was and what I was doing. Well, nearly always.

My parents lived here their whole married life. Not a big house, but a compact, three bedroom, sandstone semi, late Victorian vintage, comfortable in its 'leafy lane' surroundings, made idyllic by its long, narrow back garden. It was walled in, insulated from the outside world, our own private Eden, a haven for me but a battleground for my mother, the colloseum in which she fought her green war with aphids and slugs, mildew and blight, pests and diseases, not to mention the neighbours' cats. It was a war waged without weedkiller or insecticide, year in, year out, delighting in the mysteries and adventures each season brought. I never realised it was a war at the time, just a struggle, just my mother being pernickety, but it taught me lessons I wouldn't appreciate until I was an adult.

It was here in the garden that I'd learned to toddle and ride a tricycle. I spent hours here feeding the birds, watching over them fanatically in case a cat should come prowling. My mother used to sit with a little reference book, thumbing through it to show me pictures, teaching me to distinguish a thrush from a blackbird, helping me with my first flight into reading. In the evenings we'd marvel at the bats or follow hedgehogs as they snuffled around in the undergrowth, my mother oblivious to the fact that it was past my bedtime.

This was the garden in which I kicked a football, skinned my knee on the stone steps, enjoyed family meals and endured family get-togethers. That was where I smoked, then buried my one and only cigarette, aged eleven, innocent of the certainty that my mother would spot the disturbed patch of earth, would dig up the contraband, would put me through an interrogation that turned me every bit as green as the cigarette had. Over there, that bad winter, dad built a snowman … and had to knock it down because it terrified me. Here and there mum assembled piles of small stones for me to hurl with deadeye accuracy at marauding cats.

As childhood ebbed away, I spent time studying out here. Studying? I studied my changing body, agonised over hair length and style, distressed my jeans and denim jacket, distressed my mother with my mood swings and uncertainty. I grappled with teenage angst and endless introspection - all new to me, but exasperating for teachers and family. School had long since ceased to be a playground, was no longer a place of learning in polite attentiveness. It became an extracurricular contest as those of us, new to teenage, wrestled with the demand that we fit in while we aspired to stand out. To hide in the background or assert individuality, to be docile or to become active?

It was inevitable that I'd become caught up in the politics of youth and protest. I had doubts aplenty by the time I was 14. Doubts? I was confused, totally confused. The world of technological change and social sterility into which my parents had been born was being swept away by crises and catastrophes. I didn't know what I wanted to do with life, but I had a suspicion that something needed to be done and it had nothing to do with books.

Every day brought fresh stories of crisis and disaster, of war, civil war, ethnic cleansing, water and fuel shortages, famine, drought, and disease. I couldn't just watch it on television as if it wasn't real, as if it didn't really affect me, and yet that was what was happening to so many. Life was sanitised - the people killing one another, the people dying were different from us, different colour, different country, different world. It couldn't happen here.

On chilly mornings I'd stand with a mug of hot soup studying the patterns of frost on walls and bushes, frozen in inactivity, active only in wishing I could do something to change the world. On warm afternoons I'd sunbathe, careless and contented for the moment. Sod the world, I'd soak up my own solar power. My last autumn at home, I'd sheltered from evening showers under the old yew tree, listening to the patter of rain and rumours of my heart breaking, convinced no one in the world could ever have felt pain like mine.

The garden was a private place, but one I'd shared. My friends had grown up here, too, drinking soft drinks, graduating to beers, indulging in the adult sophistication of wines and spirits, flirting with cannabis grown in Andy K's greenhouse, playing, laughing, talking, worrying about exams or looks, earnestly seeking confirmation that so-and-so fancied them, endlessly worrying whether or not they were fanciable.

How many hours did we sit around out here? We were the most political teenagers since the first Referendum. We had to be. It was becoming increasingly obvious that we might not have a world left to inherit. 'Last Generation' music ruled our lives - we were anarchists for the environment, green commandos, humanitarian warriors, we were passionate, we were vocal, we were loud and obnoxious, and I grew bored with the fact that we were doing nothing to change things other than play music and massage our consciences with volumes of empty talk and barren rhetoric.

But we plotted and conspired here, in mum's back garden. She even egged us on with her green radicalism. And so did Debbie Hastie, my oldest friend, a constant companion since nursery school. Suddenly she became an inspiration, a schoolyard orator of irrepressible passion, a pamphleteer, a haranguer and challenger of teachers, an agitprop dynamo - as the world fell to pieces Debbie convinced me we needed to act, that we couldn't sit back and just bemoan the spread of warfare, the atrocities, the economic and environmental collapse, that we could at least change our piece of the planet. We went on demos together, we took direct action, joining Warriors for the World - though our efforts to sabotage motor cars and supermarkets were dismissed as vandalism, we felt part of an international eco-terrorism movement, fighting to reclaim the Earth and save the Environment.

Debbie Hastie, my inspiration. How long since I'd remembered her? How long since I'd been able to forget her? I looked at my mother's once perfectly maintained lawn. One summer weekend when my parents were away, when Debbie and I were seventeen, we slashed the tyres on half a dozen cars then had to run when the police appeared. We fled through the streets, climbed a couple of fences, cut through back alleys and finally clambered over the wall into the sanctuary of my mum's garden. We lay there on the grass, gasping and panting, laughing and giggling. Finally, I wandered into the house, got a couple of beers, spread a blanket on the ground, and we seduced one another, naively and passionately. Had I been that bad a lover? She left me next day for someone else.

This was the garden in which I told my parents I'd joined the Army, the real Army, Scotland's Army, never expecting to forget but desperate to escape somewhere memorable, somewhere I could sanitise my mind of all recollection of Debbie. This was the garden in which they showed me off in my uniform, their apparent optimism and excitement hardly disguising their fears. This was the place in which my mother allowed herself to cry, unaware that I was watching from behind a curtained window, unaware that I had joined in her tears.

I'd seen her cry before. I barely remember the first flu pandemic. I was four, my wee brother two. There are still pictures of him in the house. I didn't understand why he was no longer around, but my mother planted an azalea in the garden and would often be seen kneeling, talking to it.

The second pandemic came when I was nine. I remember how busy my dad was. He was a GP so he was right in the front line. He'd leave the house early in the morning, he'd return late at night. Sometimes he didn't come back at all, or he'd roll in for breakfast, exhausted, trying to find the energy and the reason to go back out and try, Cnut-like, to stem a tidal wave of death. And every day my mother hid her terror in frantic activity in kitchen or garden.

For a time dad was really sick and my mother was, well maybe not short tempered, but abrupt. I remember queuing with her for water at the stand pipe down the road, queuing for bread, queuing for flour, queuing for hours. I remember her being hyper protective, ushering me away from anyone who seemed to be coughing or sneezing, remember her shouting at some woman who tried to jump the queue. We lost one of the kids from my class - a newcomer, a boy I hardly knew - and two of the teachers from school. And we were lucky! It was obvious there were abundant personal tragedies, but I can't honestly say I felt touched by any of them.

My clearest memories are of the third pandemic, when I was fourteen. By then I understood how quickly normal life could dissolve. As people fell ill they stopped working. Electricity blackouts became routine. The stand pipes reappeared at the foot of the road - we got water three times a week, then twice a week. Deliveries to the supermarkets stopped - we still had supermarkets then. There was panic buying - people crowded round the shop doors every morning hoping something might have appeared on the shelves, then rushed to grab what they could. Monday it might be light bulbs, Tuesday, onions, Wednesday soap.

Walking into town one afternoon with a school friend we were caught up in a food riot. We turned the corner, emerged onto Dunkillin's main shopping street, and were suddenly swept along by a running crowd. Windows were being smashed, shops looted of anything that could be carried away, the market stalls overturned, the barter bazaar reduced to smithereens. I could see smoke in the distance. I thought I heard shots. Confusion. Noise. Running feet. Screams. Shouting. Breaking glass. We were jostled and pushed. We tried to get out of the press, tried to ease our way to its edge. And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the first uniform as a phalanx of special police tried to turn the crowd back.

John went down, struck by a truncheon. I was pushed to the ground, slammed in the shoulder by a shield wielded by some policewoman. As the street cleared, John and I crept away. I got him back home and sat out in the garden applying antiseptic and plasters to the cut above his eye. We were both shaking.

For the three months the pandemic held sway I remember the funerals, the constant presence of hearses on the town's streets. We lost two classmates, another couple of teachers, some relatives and friends. It was the worst outbreak of the three - they reckoned that, globally, around seven per cent of the population died, though some places had it far worse than others.

It was nearly two years before life returned to some predictable state - the supermarkets closed, they could no longer sustain enough stock to remain open, the emptied spaces being quickly squatted by market stalls and barter bazaars. Shoppers became the new breed of hunter-gatherers … people walked and walked, buying what was available, what they could afford, what they could exchange. If you got back home with four new items in your shopping bag you'd had a good day.

We used to laugh about the outbreaks of panic buying … I remember spells where sugar, toilet rolls, flour, candles, and tea suddenly became unobtainable. But the blackouts continued, the stand pipes reappeared from time to time, and there were real shortages - petrol was rationed, coffee would be unavailable for months at a time, there were few imported fruits and vegetables, meat was often scarce. People learned how to snare rabbits, poach deer, catch fish … any fish. The only thing Scotland wasn't short of was water. Unlike most of the world.

But it was that riot which had the lasting effect. It left me feeling powerless. I decided to get fit - I went out running every morning, instituted an evening routine of exercising in the garden, even acquired some weights. I started doing karate. But, beyond the physical, the riot infected me with an urge to do something. I contemplated a career in the police - my dad had always assumed that I'd go into medicine. In fact, I joined the Army cadet force, spent my weekends learning to handle a rifle, drilling, camping on hillsides, climbing rock faces and abseiling back down. I needed to argue with Debbie, to convince her that revolutionaries must know how to handle a gun, that if we were going to change the world we might need to fight for it. But, in the wake of the last pandemic, Debbie wasn't speaking to me … and I still wonder if I joined the Cadets just to spite her.

Things have a habit of taking on their own momentum. Once the Army realised I could shoot, I was detailed to cull the wild dogs and feral cats which roamed the streets and countryside in the wake of the pandemic. I'd always hated cats, so had no problem shooting them, but I was a bit squeamish about killing my first dog. It didn't last - these were vermin, shooting them was a challenge, and I basked in the glory of being the town's finest shot.

The foot and mouth outbreak took killing into industrial proportions. We shot sheep and cattle by the hundreds. It was such a gross waste. The meat wasn't tainted, it couldn't infect humans, but someone had decreed that we burn the carcases as they had in the 20^th century outbreaks. We didn't burn them all. The sergeant in charge showed us how to gut and skin the animals and we delivered a number of slaughtered beasts to the back doors of selected butchers. It was a profitable exercise and I had no qualms about circumventing the law. For two months my mum and dad had regular barbecues in the back garden - lamb and steak, veal and gammon. I think we won a lot of friends that spring.

Debbie Hastie lost both her parents to the flu and had to go live with her granny on the other side of town. She blamed the entire medical profession and took it out on me because of my dad. We'd been friends since we were four and I was heartbroken during the months she refused to talk. It was only when I lost her I realised how much I still loved her. But she'd stopped talking to people as individuals and friends. She withdrew into her anger and discovered a genius for the soapbox. I'd see her in town, organising demos, addressing small crowds, challenging passers by to stop and do something.

But she wouldn't talk to me, never looked at me, never tried to persuade me to do anything. Finally, she turned up at one of our barbecues. She was skinny and pale and I'd never before seen a human being look so alone. We sat and talked and remained in the garden till long past midnight when I finally walked her home … then danced all the way back, suddenly revitalised in love again.

Memories. I suppose I grew up in an orderly garden and a chaotic world. I got used to disaster. My whole generation did. But I also got used to the certainties that plants would grow and cats would hunt birds. Despite adversity and pain, I'd survived, I'd got by, and I'd learned to be the hunter.

So I sat there, whisky bottle in hand, soaking up the security of nostalgia, oblivious to the newly mounded azaleas or the thick smoke drifting overhead. For a while, at least, the past was a cottage garden, a bright summer's morning opening onto the prospect of a glorious day and I was restored once again to childhood, wandering out onto the patio on innocent young limbs, to yawn, stretch and contemplate the day ahead like a blank canvas.

I was back. The rest of the world might be dotted with homeless, confused, displaced people, there might even be whole empty continents being reclaimed by nature, but I had a home and I was staying. I wouldn't have dug the latrine otherwise. Would I? Did I really have anywhere else to go? Did I have any reason to go anywhere else? I sat there, trying to find a purpose, trying to cocoon myself in optimism, but I was suddenly conscious of my mortality … not the imminence of death, not the possibility of death, but the thought that I might slowly waste away, as my mother had, alone and abandoned by the world.

I couldn't stand it. Beyond the freshly weeded pyramid the world was a chaos of uncertainty and the inevitability of nature's victory. A billion mothers, weeding and planting and labouring away couldn't stem that tsunami. Above, the smoke drifted thickly and ever thicker, spiralling and twisting, caught in invisible eddies and currents.

I put the bottle down and drew my pistol, flipping off the safety catch and hauling back the slide to chamber a live round. I knew the feel of that weapon so well, knew its mechanism, knew its noises. What I didn't know was whether or not I'd hear the sound of the shot that blew my brains out. I sat there, the dark metal of the barrel resting on my lip, feeling its chill, tasting the tang of oil, imagining the discharge of a single 9mm round. How far would it have to travel from the weapon's breech to the destruction of my brainstem? Would the sound of the shot reach my ears before the round extinguished my consciousness? Would I be left a fraction of a second of consciousness monopolised by the echo of the shot?

For a time I became lost in philosophical questions as to what constituted consciousness and would my brain still have an ebbing existence after the bullet passed. Was it cowardice or courage that delayed the pulling of the trigger?

I took a swig of whisky. I heard the explosion.